Your server may be secure, but how secure is your data?

Friday 3rd January 2014 at 12:33pm by Richard Davey

Across the web on any site that stores the personal information of users, you often see a FAQ item or paragraph in the T&Cs addressing data protection and data security. This is followed by a paragraph such as "Our servers are hosted by X, one of the worlds largest hosting companies and backed up on a daily basis. They are hosted in secure data hosting centres with keycard protocols, biometric scanning protocols, round-the-clock surveillance, etc. etc."

This all sounds good and well, but is only half the story. It doesn't matter how strong the security is on the server if the site is badly coded, or if the system administrators or users have easily hackable credentials.

Sometimes a system 'flaw' is intentionally created, such as the recent hacking of Snapchat in which a feature was exploited and negatively publicized worldwide. Snapchat should have put extra precautions in place, but this is a good example of how shortcuts are taken and how easily data can be compromised.

So next time you're considering using a service online, be wary and consider the consequences of giving your personal information to a company who doesn't respect good design and development practises, or passes the buck of data security to the hosting provider!

This post was written by Richard Davey, a Web Developer and Director of Two Superior Studios Limited, who has a BSc (Hons) and MRES in Web Technologies and Security, and is also a professional member of the British Computer Society.

Comments

More News

Monday 29th June 2015 - We are pleased to announce the new Harbron Recruit website is now live! Harbron Recruit got in touch with us recently, as they wanted their Wordpress site moving to a bespoke platform and also wanted to extend their site with custom functionality.

Tuesday 28th April 2015 - Just as your screens and internet connections leap into the future, so should your website!

Thursday 23rd April 2015 - Google has now released it’s new mobile search algorithm and has released a handy tool to help you check your website.

Wednesday 15th April 2015 - Sometimes you find that your web browser just doesn’t have that certain feature that you want. Extensions and plugins have come to the rescue, but are the extensions or plugins you have installing from a trusted source?

Friday 10th April 2015 - Quite often when we need to write a large amount of code to complete a particular task we’ll first look to see if someone has already written an open source library which we can use instead of spending hours or days writing something that will do that same thing.